Contribute an Activity

Contributing an Activity to the Curriculum for the Bioregion Curriculum Collection

The Curriculum for the Bioregion curriculum collection features a collection of teaching-and-learning activities that engage students in sustainability studies and/or bioregional learning in the Puget Sound lowlands and/or the Columbia Plateau of Washington State. Activities in any college or university discipline are welcome. We invite you to contribute a description of your activity with a particular focus on the big, driving ideas or skills that you are trying to develop in your students, and on the assignment(s) that ask students to demonstrate their understanding of these ideas or attainment of these skills.

The information you provide below in this "Contribute an Activity" template will enable you to create a web page that describes your activity in detail. There are opportunities to upload files, such as lab or field trip instructions, homework or project assignments, associated lecture materials, examples of student work, or examples of student reflections on their learning. To see what this will look like, read an example: What is the West? and/or Climate Instability and Disease. (These examples open in a new window.) For now, your submission will become a private web page (viewable only by you, Curriculum for the Bioregion staff, and a small editorial board) that you can continue to revisit to edit or improve. If you and the Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative staff agree that this activity should be featured in the Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative collection, your submission will become a public web page in the collection.

If, before you get started, you have questions about whether your activity is appropriate to contribute, please communicate with Jean MacGregor.

To create the web page about your activity,

  1. Complete as much of the form as you are able to. Please note that you must, at the very least, enter your name, email address, and activity title on this form.
  2. After you press the submit button at the bottom of the page, you will be given two further instructions:
  3. to create a SERC account if you do not already have one and
  4. to transfer the information provided on the form to a web page, which you may then edit. In order to do this, you must enter at least your name, email address, and activity title on this form.
Copyright: You retain all rights to your contributed work and are responsible for referencing other people's work and for obtaining permission to use any copyrighted material within your contribution. By contributing your work to this website, you give the Curriculum for Bioregion project a license for non-commercial distribution of the material, provided that we attribute the material to you. View our license policy for more details about this kind of Creative Commons license.

Accessibility: Activities are most impactful if they are accessible to all learners. We encourage you to submit materials that follow current best practices around accessibility. While our system will attempt to present your activity as an accessible web page, only you can ensure the accessibility of any files you've uploaded. Our accessibility guidelines (opens in new window/tab) are a good place to learn more about making the content you create accessible.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to contribute to the Curriculum for the Bioregion curriculum collection!

Activity Title

The title should be evocative of the main point(s) of the activity. It needs to communicate the full context of the activity on its own as it will show up in places like search returns (e.g. Google) where people won't have any contextual clues. So it should convey the idea that this is a teaching activity, what the subject matter is and what the relevant pedagogical focus is. For example: Applying Virtue Ethics to Climate Change: A Conceptual Workshop.


Author

Name and institution of author(s) of the activity and any other appropriate attribution information. If the page is based on materials originally created elsewhere, please make note of this below with attribution given to the original authors and links provided to the original materials.

For example: This page authored by Jon Smith, Big State University, based on an original activity by Jane Smith, Smallville College.


Email

Email addresses of the activity author(s) separated by commas. These will not be displayed in the activity page but are used for internal tracking. Include only the authors who are directly involved in submitting/authoring this particular activity.


Summary

This text should make it clear what the activity is. It should provide an overview of the things that students will do and the intended outcomes. The description should be concise and compelling: typically no more than 1-2 very brief paragraphs.
For Example
In this biology lab, students investigate whether goldenrod gall fly larvae collected from restored prairie area are different from larvae collected from a small native prairie 10 km away. They look for biochemical differences in proteins using cellulose acetate electrophoresis. Students determine the genotype of each gall fly; students compare the combined class' genotypes for the two groups of gall flies statistically using chi-square analysis. Students read a related scientific paper and discuss it in a subsequent lab session. Students write a full lab report describing their results using standard scientific paper formatting. A detailed description of this format and the writing process is provided.



Learning Goals and "Big Ideas"

What concepts and content should students learn from this activity? Are there higher-order thinking skills (e.g. critical thinking, data analysis, synthesis of ideas, model development) that are developed by this activity? Are there other skills (writing, oral presentation, field techniques, equipment operation, etc.) that are developed by the activity? Please take the time to think through what the driving "big idea" (or essential concept) of this activity is, both a big idea in your discipline and a big idea in sustainability or place-based learning. From engaging in this activity, what are the key ideas/concepts that you want students to remember, years into the future?


Context for Use

This text should help faculty understand the types of teaching situations for which this activity is appropriate. Important types of context include educational level, class size, institution type, etc. Is it lab, lecture, or field exercise, or a longer project? How much time is needed for the activity. Is there special equipment that is necessary? Are there skills or concepts that students should have already mastered before encountering this activity? How is this activity situated in the course? How easy (or hard) would it be to adapt the activity for use in other settings?


Grade Level:
(Check all that apply)



Activity Description and Teaching Materials

This section should include a narrative describing the mechanics of the activity and all the materials needed to implement the activity (or links and references to those materials).
  • If the material is available on another site please provide the full url.
  • If you have the materials in hand they can be uploaded using the fields below and they will be embedded in the final page so that they can be downloaded.
  • If they are published print materials please provide a complete bibliographic reference.
  • If the activity is fully documented at another site please provide the url along with a brief (one or two sentence) description of the other site.
For all materials include, in the box below, a brief description of each item covering what it is and what its role is in the activity.

If you upload files as part of your activity remember to consider their final use in deciding on appropriate formats. Materials that other faculty are likely to modify should be provided in easily editable formats (plain text, Word files), whereas materials that will be likely only used verbatim are most convenient in formats that are universally readable (PDF format is often a good choice).

Once this form has been submitted we can work with you to integrate the downloadable files into the text of this section.

Please be sure all materials you upload can be freely redistributed. For more information about copyright as it applies to materials you are sharing through this site please check our more detailed discussion of this issue.


If you have more than 5 files include the first 5 here. After completing this form you will have the opportunity to edit the resulting web page and be able to upload additional files at that point.

Teaching Notes

This section should include notes and tips for instructors who might use the activity. Information such as common areas of confusion, things that need reinforcement, safety guidelines and other practical tips, and pointers for making the best use of the activity are appropriate. Note that this section should complement, rather than repeat, the more general guidance about the teaching method provided in the methods module of which this activity is a part.


Assessment

This section should describe how you determine whether or not students (either individually or collectively) are achieving the learning goals outlined for the activity. Other relevant assessment strategies may also be described in this section, including any informal classroom assessment techniques that you use.


Resources

This section should include references and links to print or online resources that either discuss the specific activity or will support faculty and/or students using the activity. References related to the general teaching technique should not be included here, but should be recommended for inclusion in the associated module.

Web resources should include both the url and a brief description of the site (and why it is relevant). Print resource should include basic citation information as well as a brief description of the resource.


Short Description

The short description should be a distillation of the summary above. This description will be displayed in search returns. The optimal length for this description is on the order of 1-2 sentences.






Search Terms

Use the check boxes below to tag your item with relevant search terms. You may check more than one term in each category if multiple terms apply.
Discipline



























Scale





Topic




















Note: If you choose one of the following types of pedagogies, please do NOT check the "Promising Pedagogies" box above.





Activity Duration





Readiness for use in Online Learning





After hitting the "Submit" button below,

please follow the directions on the next page that ask you to do these two additional steps:
  1. create a SERC account (if you do not already have one) AND
  2. transfer this information to a web page that you can then edit.